Flexibility

Let's consider the following scenario: In pursuit of your goal, you have failed repeatedly. Despite persistence and patience, the results indicate that you will not be able to achieve your goal in the time frame and with the resources you have.

This is the type of situation where flexibility comes in. Smart decisions need to be made. Ask yourself the following questions:

Can I use a different approach and still achieve my goal?

What is my vision?

Do I need to adjust my current goal so that it will better align with my vision?

Failure Is Learning

Learn to embrace failure in your goal-setting journey. Failures are your best teachers. There is no quicker and more permanent way to learn than to try something and fail. Consider the following:

No book, course, or trainer will teach you more than what you can learn by failing at something. Besides knowing what to do different next time, you also gain a better understanding of yourself and know what areas to improve on.

James Joyce elegantly said that "Mistakes are the portals of discovery." The difference between successful people and others is that successful people accept failure, learn from it, and use it for their next success.

Develop the mind-set that failures during the pursuit of your goals are inevitable. Do not let the fear of failure or failures stop you from taking action toward your goals.

For many of the tech startups in the last couple years, the new mantra is to "fail faster." Their approach is to build a product, albeit not perfect, and take it to customers to get their buy-in right away.

The idea is to fail earlier with lower costs invested rather than later, and use lessons from failure to build the next iteration of the product.